THE 
KEEN JOY OF LIVING 





" You never enjoy the world aright till the 
sea itself flow eth in your veins, till you are 
clothed with the heavens and crowned with the 
stars ; and 'perceive yourself to be the sole heir 
of the whole world, and more than so, because 
men are in it who are every one sole heir as 
well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and 
delight in God as misers do in gold and kings 
in sceptres, you never enjoy the world" 

Thomas Traherne. 



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Copyright, 1908, 
By Luthek H. Cary 






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CONTENTS 



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Life's an Akt 



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Life's a Game 



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Life's a Jest 



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Life's a Fairy-Tale 



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THE 

KEEN JOY OF LIVING 



LIFE'S AN ART 



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( NE of the most extraordinary things in 
the world is that two and two do not always 
make four. An ordinary-looking man sits 
down at a canvas and makes two strokes 
here and two there with his brush, and the 
result is not four strokes. It is a field, with 
the sun setting on the horizon, and one soli- 
tary tree standing up gaunt and grim against 
the sky. Or it may be a ship sailing on a 
broad sea in the sunlight, or a human face 
looking round at you with a curious, haunt- 
ing look about it that remains in your mem- 
ory for days. But whatever it is, the result 
of these two strokes and two strokes is not 
merely four strokes ; it is the spirit of even- 
ing or sea-sunshine or mocking laughter. 
The result is not four strokes ; it is a new 
world. 

So it is with music, where two notes and 
two notes are mingled together by the musi- 
cian, and the result is not four notes, but a 
great Amen, or a star in the evening sky, 
or an angel chorus. 

Now that is what all art is in the world : 
it is the taking of two common, ordinary 
things here and two common, ordinary 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

things there and the making of them into 
a wonderful and beautiful new world. The 
great parable of true art is the miracle of 
the feeding of the five thousand, where five 
common loaves and two fishes became, in 
the hands of the Master, an abundant feast 
for a great multitude. All true art is, then, 
the gathering together of the every-day 
sounds of the world from anvil and street 
and workshop, and the blending of these 
very sounds into Handel's "Messiah," or 
the gathering together of the every-day ex- 
periences from the hearts of common men 
and women into a Twenty-third Psalm or a 
beautiful hymn or poem. Art is the gath- 
ering together of the common things and 
the making of them into something beauti- 
ful. A boy and a girl shouting and laughing 
on the seashore in their play, a lad singing 
to himself as he rows his boat out in the 
waters, ships passing, and the old feeling 
of sadness and loss in the heart of some 
one who looks upon this happy scene, why, 
these are all common things which have 
come into our experience scores of times ! 
But Tennyson takes them, and listen to the 
result : 

"O well for the fisherman's boy, 

That he shouts with his sister at play ! 
O well for the sailor lad, 

That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 



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And the stately ships go on 
To their haven under the hill; 

But O for the touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still!" 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 



Why has God not made us all artists? 
How glorious it would be to be able to write 
such a poem, or to compose a piece of 
music in which thousands would find con- 
solation and peace ! Oh, why are we all 
such ordinary people without the power of 
artistic creation ! 

Let us console ourselves with the thought 
of the unsatisfactoriness of all art. The 
artist is always aiming at something which 
he cannot attain. Only second-class arv 
can be called perfect. All true art is a noble 
failure. For the true artist is aiming at 
something far above his capacity to 
express. 

What is that at which all true artists are 
aiming ? It is life, it is reality. The painter 
tries to catch the magic of the lights and 
shadows and passing graces of the human 
face he paints, but he never wholly succeeds 
in overtaking the reality. The writer tries 
to express the feelings of Romeo and Juliet 
in moonlight on the balcony, but what 
writer ever was able to express the thou- 
sandth part of the real rapture of such true 
love? All great art is an imperfect, halt- 
ing attempt to catch up upon life. For life 
is the greatest art of all, and the master- 
artist is the man who is living the 
beautiful life. We cannot all of us excel in 
the minor arts. But whether we like it or 
no, we all are artists in the art of arts and 
are producing either ugly or beautiful lives 
out of the materials at our command. 

Here we all are, then, sitting at our 



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THE KEEN JOT OF LIVING 

©// rate benches, trying to produce out of the 
materials before us a work of art, a beau- 
tiful life. 

What are the materials which have been 
given you? Imperfect health, faulty edu- 
cation, a most uninspiring home, with 
such unsympathetic parents or sisters and 
brothers, very limited means, and a natu- 
rally lazy temperament ? I see you looking 
over at my bench and thinking that if you 
only had my material it would be easy for 
you to produce a beautiful life. Stop, you 
are wrong; the task is equally hard for 
every one of us in this great art studio, 
whether you think it or not. Your materials 
are pretty poor, — I grant it, — nearly as bad 
as my own. But, my dear sir or madam, 
that is to spur you to artistic achievement. 
None of the materials of true art are beauti- 
ful to start with, otherwise there would be 
no credit in the artist's producing the grand 
result. Let your artist's pride awaken and 
make of these humdrum, unromantic life- 
materials of yours a Messiah, a Sistine 
Madonna, a Twenty-third Psalm. 

There is no pleasure in the world like 
that of the artist who out of unpromising 
materials has produced a beautiful result. 
I saw to-day that glow of honest, happy 
joy on the face of a little fellow who ran 
out of a house I was passing. With a tiny 
stub of a pencil he had produced a picture 
of a ship on the back of an old advertise- 
ment. "Oh, Miss Thomas," he was say- 
ing as I passed, holding it up to her, 'do 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

you think this is any good ? I did it with 
these," and the tiny bit of pencil and old 
advertisement sheet were in his hand. 

So we shall all stand before our Father, 
showing our poor materials, our poor result, 
the lives we have struggled over so much, 
and looking up into his face with shame at 
the failure and yet with a certain happy 
pride in the consciousness of struggle and 
achievement — "Do you think it is any 
good?" 

Yet it must always be with deep shame, 
for we remember One, the Master-Artist in 
the art of living. His life-materials were 
poor enough — humble birth, meager edu- 
cation, narrow means, spiteful enemies, 
cowardly friends, disappointed hopes, short 
life, violent and shameful death. Yet out 
of these materials what a life he produced ! 
Can we complain ? Let us rouse ourselves 
to artistic creation that the beauty of the 
Lord our God may be upon us and that all 
our lives may have a far-off likeness to the 
life of One, the Master-Craftsman in the 
making of true and noble lives. 





LIFE'S A GAME 

W HY is it, mamma," said a boy as he 
came in from a missionary meeting, "that 
good people are so uninteresting?" The 
mother was a wise woman and did not 
preach a sermon just then upon the de- 
pravity of the youthful heart which makes 
all good things uninteresting to boys, but, 
with that fairness which some parents con- 
sider so unsafe but which commands the 
confidence of sons, she answered, "Well, 
my dear, I think if good people are unin- 
teresting it is because they have not got 
enough religion." "Not got enough reli- 
gion!" answered her son; "why, this 
man was full of religion, but he was as 
uninteresting as he could be." The 
mother recognized clearly enough the 
causes which might have made this speaker 
uninteresting to her boy, but she felt there 
was justice enough in his implied charge 
that all good people were uninteresting to 
make it worth her while to answer him 
upon his own ground. As a reward she 
had this opportunity of telling him at his 
own request what real religion was. And 
this is a boy's memory of what she said, in- 
terpreted perhaps by the experiences of the 
intervening years ; I pass it on to you now 
in mv own words. 



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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

Are you enjoying life? Do you feel a 
certain kind of expectancy and glad look- 
ing forward when you awake in the morning 
as to what the events of the day may bring to 
you ? Or is it with an uneasy, disappointed, 
and somewhat guilty feeling that you find 
yourself when consciousness returns ? Have 
you come to feel how insincere and degen- 
erate all the people around you have be- 
come, and how few people can really be 
trusted in the world to-day, and how little 
true religion there is, and what a hard 
time you have had, harder than any one 
else ? Then there is something wrong with 
you. Not with life, nor with your fate or 
lot, but simply with you, with your own 
character. As the mother told her boy, you 
are one of the uninteresting good people 
who have lost their interest in the problems 
of life, and so have become uninteresting. 
What you need is more religion. 

Always remember that when the world 
looks hopelessly black to you, it shows 
that there is something wrong, not half so 
much with the world as with you. When 
a patient calls in the doctor and tells him 
that the house and the room and the out- 
side have turned yellow, the doctor does 
not take a brush and pail of whitewash to 
whiten the whole world up again. No. 
He says, "My dear sir, or madam, your 
liver must be a little out of order and your 
whole system needs toning up." He does 
not say a single word about whitening up 
the world. So the world does not need to 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

be converted half so much as you need to 
be converted. For one of the first tests of 
a true Christian is that he should enjoy life. 
This is the meaning of all our Christian 
phraseology, — forgiveness, trust, blessed- 
ness, service, faith, love. These are the 
ultimate terms in which we express the 
Christian life; all unhappy terms only 
express passing and incomplete phases 
of it. 

Several of the writers in the New Testa- 
ment look at life as a game, and it has this 
in common with all true games, that to 
play it you must take the risks, obey the 
rules, and enjoy it. It is the greatest game 
of all. Some people mistake it for a less 
interesting game than it really is One 
man thinks it is a game of gobang, where 
the point is to add as many ciphers to the 
sum of his personal fortune as he possibly 
can. Another man thinks it is a game of 
roulette, where the results depend entirely 
upon chance, and nothing else counts ex- 
cept perhaps an occasional act of dis- 
honesty. Another man thinks it is a game 
of cards, where skill counts for something 
and chance perhaps for a great deal more. 
Another man thinks it is a tug of war, 
where all that counts is pull, either in the 
literal or metaphorical sense, but where 
brains count for very little. We have all 
met people who are conducting their lives 
upon one or another of these theories. But 
in reality life is a far more interesting game 
than any of these players imagine ; none of 

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them are playing it for all it is worth. 
They have not begun to exhaust its pos- 
sibilities. It is far more like a good game 
of football, where in good play chance has 
but small influence, but where skill and 
brains and physical fitness count for a good 
deal, and where in the end the ultimate 
success of the game, as a game, depends 
most of all upon the ability to play fair and 
hard and keep one's temper. 

A game is a failure if you do not feel an 
intense interest in it. The best game is the 
game in which you lose yourself most com- 
pletely. And I say it sympathetically and 
tenderly but assuredly, that no matter what 
your fate or lot has been, you are not play- 
ing your best in the game of life unless its 
problems and dark mysteries have aroused 
in you intense interest and an emulation to 
play your part, in spite of all difficulties, in 
true sportsmanlike manner. It is the sense 
of religion preeminently that adds zest to 
our living. 

Three things are necessary for a really 
interesting game. There must be some 
risk, whether it be the mild venture in- 
volved in the chance of losing your men at 
a game of checkers, or the more terrible 
chance of breaking a collar-bone at foot- 
ball — - no game is a game without the ele- 
ment of risk. Without risk a game is merely 
a puzzle. Now it is religion which inspires 
us to take the highest risks of all, to risk all 
for God. In order to begin to live every 
one has to take some risks ; you show your 

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character by the character of the risks 
which you take. The irreligious man and 
the immoral man take the lower, less in- 
teresting risks of the world; they accept 
the risk that in the end the worldly-wise 
man may prove to be a fool and to have 
lost the very best things the world has to 
offer — love and faith and disinterested 
service. But the religious man accepts the 
higher and more glorious risks which give 
interest to his play and to himself. The 
irreligious man misses the thrilling, ro- 
mantic interest which comes from playing 
the game for all it is worth upon faith in the 
great, unseen realities of God and immor- 
tality. "How hard and discouraging your 
life here must be," said a visitor to an over- 
worked city missionary amid the depressing 
squalor of his district. "Hard!' he an- 
swered — "y es > it is hard, but, oh, what 
fun it is!" That has been the attitude 
towards life of all the greatest missionaries 
and servants of God whom I have met, 
Paton and Chalmers and Grenfell. And, 
strange to say, these are the men whom the 
boy with whom we began our discussion 
would not find uninteresting. And I am 
sure that the real reason why they are good 
and yet not uninteresting is just the reason 
the mother gave, because they have more 
religion than the rest of us. 

The second thing essential to a good 
game is the intellectual interest which 
comes from attempting to keep the rules. 
The more intricate and difficult the situa- 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

tions in the game become, the greater the 
interest in trying to win the game while 
obeying the rules. It is easy to win almost 
any game by cheating, but the real player 
wants to win the game fairly. The re- 
ligious man gets more fun out of the game 
of life because he is the man who is trying 
fairly to keep the rules. He tries to thread 
his way honestly among the thousand and 
one problems of right and wrong which 
meet him in daily life. Of course it is hard ; 
what game is worth anything which every 
one can play perfectly right off? It is in 
trying to apply the principles of religion to 
the intricate affairs of his every-day life 
that a man gets the intellectual stimulus of 
a good game. The wrong way is always 
the laziest, the least stimulating way; it is 
the line of easiest resistance, and the man 
who always moves along that line loses in 
the end his interest in life, for he loses his 
power of choosing between two paths, and 
in this power lies the heart of the interest 
in all games. How grand is the problem 
of the religious man ! It is how to be suc- 
cessful and happy and beloved while at 
the same time keeping God's rules of right 
and wrong, while being just and honest and 
sympathetic and true. 

It is religion, then, which inspires us to 
play hard, to play fair, and, lastly, to play to 
win. For the last essential of a good game 
is that we should have something to play 
for. Some play for the prize, some for 
relaxation, some for strength; all play for 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

something they long to gain. What prize 
does religion offer us ? In this world a body 
worn out in the service of our fellows, con- 
stant strain and effort, many failures to 
effect that at which we aimed, continual 
disappointments, suspicions here and there 
of unfair tactics on the part of the other 
side? Yes, all these things the players at 
the game of life must endure during the 
game, but what game worth the name de- 
mands less from its devotees ? The prize 
that life offers to those who live aright is, 
first of all, the continual joy of participation 
in the finest game in the world, and beyond 
that an assurance which no real player can 
doubt, that our side is going to win in the 
end. 

What that winning means none of us can 
even dream of. There is a prize beyond the 
mere joy of playing, for this is a game for 
the upbuilding and strengthening, not of 
the body and mind merely, but of the char- 
acter, and God has some glorious use for 
those spiritual athletes who fit themselves 
through the discipline of this life for greater 
and happier achievement beyond. 




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LIFE'S A JEST 



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ITRANGE as it may seem, it was an old 
Scotch elder who said, "The want of a 
sense of humor is the unpardonable sin." 
It is true that its absence is almost a sin, 
for a man's attitude towards life is not 
wholesome if he be without it. And the 
humorless state is so hopeless as to be al- 
most unpardonable, the proverbial surgical 
operation for the purpose of introducing a 
joke into a hard head not yet having been 
invented. It is an unpardonable sin, for 
life in some of its aspects is a jest, and the 
only righteous and rational attitude of 
human beings towards life in many of its 
manifestations is deep, hearty laughter. 
The sense of humor at its best is one of the 
deepest things in life. It is a spiritual per- 
ception of the vast, incongruous discrep- 
ancy which exists between things as they 
seem and things as they really are. It is 
not, then, as is so generally supposed, one 
of the superficial elements of life. It is 
part of all that is healthiest and noblest in 
humanity. 

The plan of life and the infinitely subtle 
adjustments of nature teach us of the in- 
tellectual power of the divine mind; we 
can infer from the beauty of the world that 
God loves beautiful things; so from the 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

humorous vein which runs through real 
life we must read back to a deep sense of 
humor in the divine mind. "He that sit- 
teth in the heavens shall laugh." There is 
a spark of omniscience in all real laughter. 
Most of our humorous appreciation springs 
from our delighted comparison between the 
two sides of a thing, the apparent and the 
inner. We are delighted that we have got 
the inside view, and the thought of the 
deceptive appearance of the outside makes 
us chuckle with an omniscient feeling of 
superiority. A truly omniscient view of 
the world, the absolute comparison between 
its outer appearance and its inner reality, 
cannot fail to be a tender and sympathetic 
view and yet also deeply humorous. The 
career, for instance, of a seemingly success- 
ful rogue must be very humorous when 
viewed in its completeness by the omnis- 
cient eye, as it is seen clearly how, in spite 
of all his self-confidence, his tricks and 
subterfuges, he is inevitably working out, 
step by step, his own disclosure and ruin. 
Sin is not only sad, it is ridiculous when 
seen by wisdom in its true light. There 
is subject for laughter as well as for tears 
in the complete view of the life of any 
man of whom it cannot be said, "What- 
ever record leap to light, he never will be 
shamed !" There is eternal irony in the 
fruitless attempt to establish a kingdom of 
darkness in God's world of light. 

This is true in Shakespeare's view of 
life, for his mind partakes more of omnis- 

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cience in his knowledge of human charac- 
ter than that of any other of modern times. 
With Shakespeare we can laugh at the 
worst rogues, and feel that we do right to 
laugh, because he makes us laugh not 
merely at their wit, but oftentimes at the 
essential ridiculousness of sin in itself. He 
makes us do this with full sympathy for all 
that is left wholesome in the sinner, such as 
his lively fancy and inventiveness. Yet 
under all that, our chief delight springs 
from our appreciation of the comic irony 
in the contrast between the serious, sinful 
intention of the rascal and the way in 
which he is actually ultimately defeating 
his own end. 

Unfortunately Christ's reporters had not 
much of this virtue, and have transmitted 
to us merely stray glimpses of the humor 
of their Master. Traces of a gentle irony, 
however, run all through the Gospel narra- 
tives, often hardly appreciated by the writer 
or the reader. "Beautifully" (/caXaW), 
Christ says in Mark 7 : 9, "do ye reject the 
commandment of God, that ye may keep 
your tradition." And there is quiet humor 
in the way in which the phrase "with per- 
secutions ' ' is inserted at the end of the list 
of the "houses, and brethren, and sisters, 
and mothers, and children, and lands," 
which those who followed him would re- 
ceive now in this time. 

That a genuine humorous appreciation 
of the intrinsic ridiculousness of the sin 
does not necessarily detract from one's 

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moral detestation of it is shown in the 
humorous description Jesus gives of the 
manner in which the "hypocrites" go 
forth to do an act of charity, " sounding a 
trumpet before them in the synagogues and 
in the streets." "Verily I say unto you," 
adds Jesus three times as he thinks of their 
easy success in gaining the publicity they 
desired, — "Verily I say unto you, They 
have their reward." Such gleams of the 
humor of Jesus have half-unconsciously 
strayed into the narratives of his serious- 
minded reporters. We are glad even of 
these faint hints of what the Master's humor 
must have been, because to-day this sense 
seems to us an indispensable quality in 
every broad, lovable character. 

Such humorous appreciation as that we 
have been speaking of springs from sub- 
lime faith in God, from the absolute assur- 
ance that in spite of adverse appearances 
God's great, good plan is being surely worked 
out to its final consummation everywhere. 
Faith, hope, love, and the sense of humor, 
no one of these can be present in its fulness 
perhaps without the other, but all are nec- 
essary to one who is seriously struggling to 
help this sinful, suffering world. There is 
a humorous side to ignorance, jealousy, 
thanklessness, and immaturity, and these 
are the chief causes of worry with those 
who are sincerely trying to work for the 
good of society. Blessed is the man who can 
bear the sin of the world upon his heart 
till he has done his best to heal it, and 

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then, when it threatens to load him down 
with useless worry, is able to side-track it 
all on to the lines of humor, and laugh with 
all his soul at the hypocrites with their 
trumpets and the Pharisee with his pre- 
posterous prayer. 

The great moral issues of the life outside 
of us have, then, their essential humor, their 
comic irony, the thought of which is ever a 
relief in times of depression to bring us 
back from desperate, fanatic earnestness to 
human sanity again, and to the remem- 
brance of the great, good, abiding, change- 
less facts of life. 

But our own lives are even more fertile 
in humor for us than is the life of the world. 
The absence of a sense of humor is almost 
always accompanied by self-conceit, be- 
cause the poor man defective in this re- 
spect accepts himself among the serious 
facts of life. All incidents which have 
happened to him have become thereby 
events of general interest. 

But as long as you can genuinely laugh 
at yourself, at your ridiculous pretensions 
to be somebody and know something, at 
the terrible disparity between your friends' 
opinion of your powers and your own more 
intimate knowledge of your own slipshod, 
faulty work, — as long as you can sin- 
cerely recognize at times with laughter your 
own insignificance in the universe, as long 
as you refuse to take yourself entirely 
seriously, so long is your soul not lost. 
Stevenson could heartily laugh at himself; 

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Thackeray could wonder why, as he said, 
people did not discover what an old fraud 
he really was. Even Sir Andrew Aguecheek, 
in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," is not 
hopeless, because, as Dowden says, "through 
his soft veil of silliness and imbecility glim- 
mers for a moment the faint suspicion that 
he is an ass." 

So far we have considered two great 
sources of the refreshing stream of the 
humor of life, — first, in the faith that while 
the world is not finished (hence the incon- 
gruity), yet it seems to be coming all right 
(hence the possibility of laughter) ; second, 
in the vast dissimilarity between the ideal 
which we know in our mind constitutes 
good work and our ow r n laborious and 
much vaunted achievement. But a great 
portion of the genuine humor of the world 
arises from a third source, — from a recog- 
nition of those great spheres of life which 
are neither moral nor immoral, but simply 
non-moral. 

We have seen that the sense of humor 
saves us from fanaticism and egoism ; from 
this third point of view it is an emotional 
antiseptic and delivers us from all eager and 
shrill intensity. We are saved thereby from 
the slush of sentimentalism. There are 
facts in life which ought not to be made the 
text for a sermon, but rather the subject for 
a joke. The esthetic bride and bride- 
groom of DuMaurier's picture in Punch 
are discussing their newly acquired six-mark 
teapot with intense expressions of artistic 

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fervor — it is " divine ' and "consum- 
mate. " At last the bride, carried away 
by her enthusiasm, says, "O Algernon, let 
us live up to it !" A sense of humor saves 
us from praying that we may live up to 
teapots and from everlasting preaching. 
Humor from this point of view is the mark 
of the man who is relating things to an- 
other and so doing a little thinking. Wit 
brings into relation the superficial incon- 
gruities of things in a manner to excite our 
delighted surprise. The pun, for instance, 
relates words to one another in unexpected, 
incongruous ways. Humor finds in the 
deeper things of life the same unexpected 
likenesses and unlikenesses, the same dis- 
similarity between appearance and reality, 
the same oddities and vagabond relations, 
as wit finds in mere words and intellectual 
technique. Harmony in the relations of 
thought excites our admiration, difficulty 
in relating facts to one another excites 
mental effort and logical thought. But 
every now and again we come upon a rela- 
tion in the world of thought which does not 
excite us to admiration by its harmony, or 
jar upon us and stimulate us by its difficulty 
and mystery, but which makes us laugh by 
its very defiance of all laws and "gives us a 
sudden glory for a moment, a holiday from 
the schoolroom of exact thought and serious 
effort." Humor in modern times is pene- 
trating deeper and deeper into life. 

The mere pun is despised. Humor is 
becoming more and more thoughtful. By 

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this is meant that thought had penetrated 
deeply into the mysteries of life before the 
humorous relation of things to each other 
was discovered. Humor presupposes cer- 
tain trains of thought, and these presup- 
positions are often best conveyed to the 
popular mind through their gratuitous 
jangling in humor rather than in their 
harmonious logical sequence. Many of 
the most noxious errors have been laughed 
out of court. The recognition of this great 
holiday world of humor is an essential in 
the happy and useful life to-day. It is 
often the third way of escape in life's 
most unpleasant dilemmas. It saves one 
from the necessity of telling many a lie and 
committing many a discourtesy. Escape 
to this world of humor when busybodies 
come asking you questions they have no 
business to ask; when the insincere, 
thoughtless questioner tries to disprove 
the noble faith of life. When the world 
has grown dark for you and you are lonely, 
do not enter upon long evenings of auto- 
suggestive worrying about things in general, 
but take down your Don Quixote and read 
how "Don Quixote could not help smiling 
at the simplicity of Sancho. ,: It is the mark 
of breadth of mind, of the mind that tries 
to see things in all their relations. It is the 
great humanizer, it is absolutely democratic, 
it can laugh at everything except the ulti- 
mate harmonies of life which excite worship 
and admiration. It is the mark of the 
idealist who fears no comparisons even the 

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THE KEEN JOT OF LIVING 

most incongruous, because he is so sure that 
the ultimate reality is noble and right. It 
shows us the funny side of the worst mis- 
fortune. Stevenson with a smile could call 
the disease which he knew was killing him, 
"Bloody Jack." It permits a continual 
innocent escape from restraint and con- 
vention. And yet, like all valuable posses- 
sions, it is most dangerous. It is much 
easier to be a righteous man without it than 
with it. It is onlv safe in the life of one 
who loves the great harmonies of existence, 
honor and kindness and morality and 
justice, a thousand times more than he does 
all the "quips and cranks and wanton 
wiles" of humor. Yet to succeed in life 
one must know what things are not to be 
taken seriously, and to the man in tune 
with the universe there is always a point of 
view from which "Life's a Jest." 



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iIFE'S an art; your one talent together 
with all your limitations and temptations 
and drudgeries are raw material out of 
which it is your task to produce a work of 
art, a beautiful life. 

Life's a game; enter it with all your 
heart and soul. Play it for all it is worth. 
Whether in triumph or defeat, manifest the 
true sportsmanlike qualities, — adventurous 
daring, hardihood, and fair play. 

Life's a jest; nothing is finished, every- 
thing is in the making, the world is still 
full of odd-looking tag-ends of circum- 
stance, and humorously deceptive ap- 
pearances of things. Be not so woodenly 
serious that you cannot see sometimes how 
very funny it all looks. 

Yes, all through the day our common 
art inspires us to admiration and achieve- 
ment. Playing full-heartedly ourselves 
and cheering on our fellow players in the 
game, we spend the long hours of sunlight, 
laughing and rejoicing merrily through it 
all. But in the evening comes the time 
when the children are tired, — when they 
cease trying to do things for themselves, and 
gather in the gloaming round their mother 
for a story. Tired of the real world with 
its hard knocks and lost toys and petty dis- 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

appointments, they turn to the ideal world. 
They want a fairy-story. 

Such times come to us all, when we do 
not need to be spurred to artistic achieve- 
ment, or to be urged to play our parts like 
true men and women, and when all mere 
laughter seems out of place. We want to 
know now not our own duty ; that is clear 
enough. We want some deeper explana- 
tion of life and all things. We want to hear 
the voice of some mother-love in the gloam- 
ing telling us a wondrous fairy-tale that 
is truer far than are all the shapes seen 
dimly in the shadows around us. Then to 
our souls the great Father and Mother 
Spirit takes up the story of the ideal reality 
of things, and life for us becomes a fairy- 
tale. These common things of every day, 
the voice seems to tell us, are not really 
what they seem, — these toys upon the 
floor, and this fire, this room, this life. All 
things mean more than they seem. All 
common things are transformed into 
strange, new creatures, and become pos- 
sessed of strange, new powers, in fairy-land. 
For fairy-land is the real world which lies 
just within this, seeming world. 

Then we learn this last great lesson, that 
religion is comfort. It is religion that gives 
meaning to life, then, through all these 
earlier stages we have spoken of; now it 
is religion which adds the last touch to the 
mellowing of the full and true humanity 
which it has inspired and strengthened 
and made glad in earlier years. 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

The charm of the true fairy-tale lies in 
two things, — that anything may happen, 
and that it all turns out well in the end. 

Anything may happen. Cinderella has 
only her pumpkin and her mouse-trap. 
But the pumpkin suddenly one day be- 
comes a fine coach gilded all over with 
gold, and the six mice in the mouse-trap 
when touched by the wand become six 
horses of a beautiful mouse-colored dapple- 
gray. 

Never despair in the fairy-story of 
your life; anything may happen. In the 
end the best is truest. This is the good 
news of religion. It is a message of hope. 
Do not despair over the dark experience 
which has come into your life. Suddenly, 
after years, the terrible dragon which has 
kept you in fearful bondage and trem- 
bling so long is touched by the wand of 
time, of forgiveness, of new insight, and 
it becomes a fairy-prince golden and 
glorious, ready to conduct you into a 
new world. 

Your kitchen and your pumpkin ? Who 
knows what they may become if only 
touched by religion's magic wand ? Your 
narrow home may become a Bethel, the 
very house of God, the very gate of 
heaven. 




THE KEEN JOT OF LIVING 

point of swallowing the defenseless, beauti- 
ful princess. Do not recoil from the story 
in horror. Go on with it bravely. It is 
going to turn out all right in the end. The 
fairy prince will come to hand just in time 
to save his future bride. Something like 
this is the comfort of the long, broad, deep 
view of life which religion gives us. The 
children around are breathlessly waiting 
for the great surprise which always comes 
towards the end of the story. They can 
only dimly surmise as they look forward 
how the hero and the heroine are going to 
be safely delivered from the treachery and 
injustice which surround them, but they 
implicitly trust the love which has made 
their home of life so pleasant, to satisfy 
them with this life-story in the end. So 
religion teaches us that somehow, we can- 
not yet fully understand how, it is all well 
with the noble soul. There is a great 
secret. "Pain is not the fruit of pain." 
There is a mystical truth, only half 
guessed, only half experienced still. The 
words are long and hard to understand, 
and we children can only half surmise 
all their meaning, — Atoning Love, Life 
Eternal, Everlasting Reunion, Immortality. 
What can we children do but picture to 
ourselves wonderful childish pictures of 
what they all mean ? Surely these words 
which so constantly recur in the tale tell of 
some wondrous surprise at the end of the 
story. Yes, this is the last and most glorious 
of the uses of religion, that to every noble 

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THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING 

soul it says in a voice so intimate and 
true and tender that it is its own best 
evidence : 

" But hush : for you there can be no despair ; 
There's amends. 'Tis a secret. Hope and pray." 




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